poetry

  In this habit of rotting the root fails to make do.   Wide blueblack straits spied from the shore recall this darling aporia of mine.   I’m to be given thus a crozier, I’ll wander to meet an elder … Read More

  Heavier than age Morning has us By the throat. Why do you birds rise so early? Birds have tiny tongues A bird is a bell. Dark people in white clothing Creep around town. Heaven, heaven, pour into their ears … Read More

  Fishermen went out to sea Fisherwomen ran after them A boy is standing in the doorway With a toy ship His eyes have dried up Deep inside them The silhouettes of skeletons Tangled in anchors

  After a couple of glasses of wine they founded Mundelein in Illinois. The stars were blurry but the roads were alright, and people came anyway from all over to settle the town. Now every spring in Mundelein the men … Read More

  Men with beards of dirt and fire went around the woods, swinging hammers to symbolize dominion. The marks by which they made themselves known upon the trees were all kept in a book in Williamsport (where even the sidewalks … Read More

  The dumb thing I said keeps coming back to dismantle my house, poor dredged brain with its banging doors and hinges halved to sheer the sky. Swallows traffic the opposite way to the chimney, orange construction cones lift toward … Read More

  Flagpole or war ship, the first purple asparagus drills its blunt rigging through the dirt. You want to say worship this— but it’s relentless, like the first time you stick your finger down the baby’s throat. How wrong to … Read More

  Clambering down the rocky bank she found the fish sleeping below a viridian copse of chestnuts. Somewhere inside the night she had heard their crying and it had led her here. She had walked through glass stained the color … Read More

  for Wanda Coleman   If you break enough lines, eventually you have something that’ll kindle & catch like a tar paper shack or a wedding dress. A long gone woman once took a stone to all her words until … Read More

  All’s rooted here in forgiveness— forgiver and forgiven deep   in the textured present. Pleasure rises from the dappled surface,   where, in the chaos of patterns, a woman emerges, then   another, flowered dress against flowered wall.   … Read More

  Flap from your sea grass shelter, hiss at the dog who flushes you out lumber lopsided a zigzag track like a bride dragging her heavy train. Your fractured wing makes you denser than sky. Watch your flock fly away … Read More

  Have you heard the one about the nun and the penguin in the bathtub and the nun drops the soap and says to the penguin, Do you think you could fish that out? And the penguin says, What do … Read More